Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the College English Association, New Orleans, LA, April 1996.
Abstract: This paper describes an assignment used in a Technical Writing course. Instead of presenting a traditional technical report, students create World Wide Web pages using information gathered from the Internet. By asking them to master both their report topic and Hyper Text Markup Language, the assignment helps to accustom students to their social role as professional experts. Furthermore, the experience they gain in working with Web documents enhances their sensitivity toward the contextual nature of communication, allowing them to become more skilled communicators in other media.
The translation from paper to an electronic medium has a number of advantages. First and foremost, students are engaged by designing Web documents in a way they are not by a traditional print report. Keith Kilpatrick, a student last summer, noted that "Writing hypertext was more fun than writing a normal paper because we had more 'freedom' to express ourselves and convey our information." Second, the demands of designing for the Web are high. As I will discuss momentarily, designing good documents for the Web forces students not only to address significant technical issues but also to hone their skills in communication in order to entice the fickle Web user. Finally, the fact that the projects are accessible to friends and family in distant places, as well as to prospective employers, definitely encourages more thoughtful and polished work than that found in text reports. Just by virtue of being "published," even if they are never looked at by anyone outside of class, these documents become more significant in the eyes of their authors.
Still, their knowledge is limited to how to work Netscape--most are unfamiliar with the Internet's origins in the military, the relationship of the Web to older Internet devices like ftp, gopher, and WAIS, and the fiber-optic technology supporting the global network. Because this information is necessary to be an informed Web author, I have students read and summarize articles on the Internet, the WWW, and Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. Right before we enter the computer classrooms, I spend a class or two lecturing on basic concepts like the client-server model and the ways that files are referenced on the WWW. This extensive introduction takes significant time--students work outside of class for about two weeks and I lecture in class for a day or two--but it greatly smooths the transition into the computer lab by equipping students with a knowledge base that they can use when authoring their own Web pages. When I didn't provide this extensive an introduction, I spent the first two weeks in the computer classroom running around answering very basic questions that revealed fundamental misconceptions about the Internet, the WWW, and HTML.
Once in the classroom, the first goal is to get them using HTML to create a Web page. To script HTML, you can use any text editor -- a word processor will do nicely -- but to ease our introduction, we use an HTML editor for the Macintosh called Web Weaver, which is shareware and freely available off the Net. Web Weaver provides an easy entrance into HTML because it operates like a word processor and has user friendly buttons that insert HTML commands in much the same way that Microsoft Word buttons format text. During the first two or three classes, I demonstrate some basic commands and then leave them to create their documents. To focus students' efforts, the first HTML assignment is due about ten days after we enter the lab, and for that I ask that they write a home page describing them and their interests. In preparation, I provide a list of interesting home pages to look at as well as printouts of my page and the code used to create it. Looking at other people's HTML code is one of the best ways to learn it, and it's easy to do because in Netscape the "View Source" command lets you see the source code of any page. I frequently start class with a "Site of the Day" that contains some interesting technique or trick so that students are exposed to a wide variety of approaches and so that they increase their technical knowledge gradually.
After about a week, students have completed the basic layout of their home page which they store on a floppy disk. To make that page accessible on the WWW, we put it up on a server using a file transfer program called Fetch. Surprisingly enough, this process, or rather the idea of this process, causes great difficulty. Fetch is an extremely user friendly program, down to the running dog that is its icon, and students pick it up quickly, but the concept of the server is a difficult one. Frequently I get questions like "How can my group members get access to my file?" When I respond, "Put it on the server and you'll all have access," that idea takes awhile to sink in. I can only surmise that the other means of storage commonly used are either proprietary -- you store a file on your disk or your computer -- or tangible -- you store a file on the hard drive of Library Mac #33. Of course, the server is just a computer, like Library Mac #33, but it is intangible, never seen and contacted only over a network. That even technical students have difficulty conceptualizing what a server is and where their files are indicates how deeply we think of information in terms of its physical representation, and in terms of the ownership of that representation. It is for some disturbing that files stored on a server accessible via the Web are never "my" files or "your" files because they can be easily replicated by any client who requests them. This type of disorientation illustrates one of the biggest challenges for teachers using the Internet and the WWW: while the technical skills may be relatively easy to pick up, conceptual adjustments occur only over time.
In addition to addressing these challenges, designers must remember that people connect to the Web in different ways, the lucky with fast direct network connections and the home user usually with a modem that transmits at 14.4 bits/second. It takes a 14.4 modem approximately nine minutes to download a 1 megabyte image file, a delay that for the Web designer means minimizing the use and size of images. But it is big, bright, clickable images that attract people to the Web in the first place. So, the designer has to compromise, taking advantage of the possibilities offerred by the most advanced software and network connections, but constructing alternatives for users with more limited access. Studies of computer users reveal that for routine computing tasks, delays need to be less than 20 seconds or the user becomes distracted and frustrated, so we evaluate the loading times of pages against this benchmark and propose alternative designs for slow-loading pages.
The WWW itself is the best teacher of what's possible and desirable or undesirable in Web design. After a lecture on functional and aesthetic issues, we spend a class period or two examining various good and bad pages and discussing what we like or don't like about them. This exercise is essential for solidifying functional issues like clear navigation and uniform document appearance as well as aesthetic concerns like managing backgrounds with taste. [Figure 2] At this point, it is also helpful to explore alternatives to big imagemaps and to discuss ways to construct aesthetically pleasing pages that are nonetheless manageable in terms of size.
Because Web design is such a complex business, it is ideal for introducing students to the multiple constraints that characterize professional communication. To encourage consideration of those constraints, the final project requires documents that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional when viewed by different browsers, in this case Netscape and Lynx. Throughout the course, we emphasize the need to design for various browsers by looking at the same page via Mosaic and Lynx as well as Netscape, and I encourage those with access to other browsers to check their pages there as well. If all acts of communication are situated, then the technical aspects of the WWW make every act even more deeply contextualized, dependent on platform, program, network, and more. If students can translate the sensitivity toward context they gain by working with the Web, then they can become more aware and skilled communicators in other media as well.
Another positive aspect about using this assignment as opposed to a print one is that the technical constraints of the Web force students to take the task more seriously than they might a text report. This is particularly so at Georgia Tech, where Technical Writing is a required course that students have little interest in taking and that they expect to be easy. Not only does introducing them to the Web make them more excited about the class, but also the technical aspects of the Web encourage them to devote more attention and energy than they would to a text document. Students perceive that the skills they gain here are marketable and therefore worthwhile, unlike most English classes, of course. Adena Fullard, a graduating senior, wrote "Other friends of mine are having to write long proposals (blah!). This [assignment] was fun, interesting and will be helpful in the real world of computer technology." Of course, the real world requires skills in communication as well as computers and in fact, Adena has done more than learn a few HTML tags this quarter. In mastering the technical limitations of the medium, students are forced to pay attention to basic concepts like audience and purpose, as well as visual design elements like color theory. In short, they have to take communication seriously and in so doing they significantly advance their abilities as communicators.
Logistical Requirements
Getting an assignment like this one started requires a great deal of preparation both in terms of knowledge and logistics. How strenuous the logistical tasks are depends on your institution. At Tech, I had to personally contact the Office of Information Technology to reserve space on the server and to create the computer accounts we needed. In departments that run their own server, this process will be greatly facilitated. Institutional peculiarities will also determine how easy or difficult it is to gain access to computer classrooms for the several weeks required. Once the logistical structures are in place, however, it is easy to renew arrangements each term, resulting in little extra work.
Aside from logistical needs, such assignments require the professor to be familiar with the Internet and the WWW and to have mastered several applications, most obviously Netscape and an HTML editor. In addition, however, you at least need to know how to use limited unix (if you use a unix server), file transfer programs like Fetch, and graphics applications, the latter being perhaps the most important. The images that make the WWW so appealing are complex creatures which come in a variety of types and require a wide variety of graphics programs to access and modify them. To answer students' questions about why an image file did this or looked like that, I've had to use the applications myself. Additionally, creating WWW documents frequently requires that you scan images such as photographs into digitized form, so access to a scanner is desirable.
If working with the Web requires teachers to advance their computing knowledge, it also demands adjustments to teaching style. As one individual put it, the teacher moves from being the "sage on the stage to the guide on the side" (quoted from unidentified source in Schofield, 201). This is not true solely of working with the Web but of working with computers in general: depending on the layout of the lab, it can be difficult to gain access to certain areas of the room, limiting the amount of time that you interact with specific groups. And the collaborative work students do encourages discussion between members, resulting a noisy classroom in which all the noise is certainly not related to the projects or to the Web. In her two-year study of computing at a high school, Janet Schofield cites fears of these developments as one reason computers are not adopted in class activities, even when they are available (201-206). She observes that our existing social patterns, including the role of teacher in the classroom, inhibit the transformative potential of computers and that social as well as technological factors need always be considered when introducing computers into a classroom.
Despite the potential roadblock of custom, I strongly believe that English departments should embrace computers, and in particular network technologies, as we reconfigure our profession for the twenty-first century. Networked computers offer us too much to turn our backs on them, as a recent Syllabus survey which places English departments dead last in use of computers suggests that we have done. For a long time now, as this survey suggests, computing in English has occurred only at selected schools and usually just in composition programs. With the development of easily accessible Internet technologies like the Web, however, that all can change and computing can be introduced into the whole gamut of courses that we teach. This introduction will change the profession and our roles in it in ways we cannot hope to predict, but it also may keep the profession alive.